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Jesus Is Not Coming Soon

Although they're fresh off their last brutal beatdowns by reality in 2011 and 2012, Christian prognosticators are yet again forecasting the End of the World. It doesn't matter that they've been wrong every single time they've done this for 2000 years. It doesn't matter that Jesus himself told his followers that nobody knows this stuff. Some Christians are always predicting The End, because The End is all that interests them. So it is that on my drive to Baylor University this morning, I saw that someone has bought a billboard on I-35 to advertise that now Jesus will return on August 2, 2027.

Yes, fourteen years from now. So we've got plenty of time to lose our minds.

My family occupied Southern Baptist and Pentecostal churches, twin traditions that predicted the Rapture of the Saints as imminent, and millions of American Christians are still looking for the Rapture next Tuesday or so. The Rapture, for those of you fortunate enough not to have been inculcated with the belief, is a recent reading or misreading of scripture dating back to the 19th century, and made popular in the United States in the 20th by the Scofield Reference Bible (one of which I was given by my Assembly of God grandfather). In a primary understanding of the Rapture, Jesus will make a special trip back to lift the faithful into the skies before the Great Tribulation (since God wouldn't want God's people to remain among the suffering hordes), and then later, Jesus will return again (maybe he has frequent flyer miles) to preside over the Final Battle and the Final Judgment.

Some of my relatives have been trying to convince me for fifty years that the signs of the present moment are all in alignment ("Prince William is the Anti-Christ. Honest! This time I'm right!"), and the Rapture is about to occur, but I ain't buying it. It's the same thing they've been trying to sell since I was a kid, when The Oak Ridge Boys sang "Jesus Is Coming Soon" (and I also sang it as a "special" (a solo) in church in my unchanged boy soprano):

Jesus is coming soon, morning or night or noon Many will meet their doom, trumpets will sound All of the dead shall rise, righteous meet in the skies Going where no one dies, heavenward bound

Jesus didn't come. For many years, this constant failure to read God's calendar aright made me think all Christianity was dopey. Now I simply believe that it's the Rapture that is trash theology, and I argued so at length in my book The Other Jesus. Partly I don't want to believe in a Christianity that's more about membership cards than being with those who suffer, and I don't believe the vision of the Rapture and the Angry Jesus cleansing the world are in accord with the messages of the Gospels.

But mostly I want us all to stop talking about Heaven and Hell, about who's going to be in either one, about the Rapture of the Saints, about whether Jesus will return with a sword or on a unicorn.